


Expecting

by sageclover61



Series: Paradise [7]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Archangels, Cuddling & Snuggling, Eating Disorders, Emotions, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Hormones, I'm sorry but what do you expect from pregnant archangels?, M/M, Michael has an eating disorder, Platonic Cuddling, Pregnancy, Pregnant archangels, Sam Winchester Has an Eating Disorder, along with the angst of course, did I mention that there's going to be fluff?, pregnancy hormones
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2020-09-24 10:30:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20357002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sageclover61/pseuds/sageclover61
Summary: Michael saves his family, but at what cost to himself? He's alive, but not exactly in full health, and it's probably going to be a long [insert length of archangel pregnancy here]. But they're alive, and that's what really matters in the moment. They're all alive.





	1. The Unexpected

**Author's Note:**

> This chapter is supposed to be called "The Unexpected" and there were supposed to be cookies for anyone who got the sims 3 reference here.

He was wrath. He was vengeance. Michael was the Viceroy of Heaven and no one was going to lay a hand on anyone in his family. Not on Gabriel's Fosterlings. Not on a nameless fledgling. Not on his daughter. Not even God. Not today. Not in any future he was going to be apart of. Not on his life.

They’d wondered for far too long at this eventuality, and they should have acted sooner. But Michael wasn’t going to dwell on regrets of past inaction. He was here now and he would put an end to the fear  _ this instant _ .

He knew that there was no way he could actually kill God if he were to face him, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that  _ no one  _ got to hurt his family without consequence.

And so he stood between the three cowering children and the Entity intent on destroying them for merely attempting to knock on the door.  _ Not today _ . Sword in hand, he  _ repelled _ .

Chuck, the prophet God had been masquerading as, and his reign of tyranny, were over. For good this time. If he could just  _ defend. _

He could feel the pressure of destructive intent coming towards him like a tidal wave, and he cut through it with a single slash with his suddenly summoned archangel blade.  _ Not today. Not any day. Never again. _

Michael took a step forward, switching to the offensive with an instinct that had been tapped down for far too long. God would no longer torture his family. Never again.

Without conscious thought, he whispered words that he had almost spoken before for an entirely different purpose.

God had locked Amara into a prison of nothing, but she had eventually managed to free herself.

Instead of reusing Her prison, he would lock God away into the cage built to contain Heylel. It  _ would  _ hold Him. And with the seals used up,  _ it would never open again. _ Not again. Never again. They  _ would  _ be free.

And then He was gone from their lives, and Michael collapsed onto the ground, clutching his stomach and pressing his forehead into the dirt.

The pain radiated through his body, his abdomen, his wings. It felt like he was being devoured from the inside.  _ And he couldn’t feel his grace. _

“Michael!”

That was not any of the children still standing safely behind him, but he knew that voice better than any other.

“Auntie Ama!” Michael did not try to lift his head. It would have taken far too much energy.

“Mikha, Sweetie, why would you do this to yourself?” She asked. “You could have died, to say nothing of your unborn child!”

Unborn… child? What was she talking about? “Tal-ia?” Was his daughter okay? She had to be okay, wasn’t she in Heaven with the others? God hadn’t returned to Heaven, He was in the Cage. They were all safe, they had to be!

He was hyperventilating and it was doing nothing for the stabbing pain.

“Talia is fine, she’s still in the big nest.” Oh, thank Her. “I’m referring to the one you are  _ currently  _ pregnant with. The one you seem pretty content to pretend does not exist?”

“That’s… not possible.” This was an illusion, a lie. It had nearly broken his heart to hear Sam’s suspicions that he was pregnant for this very reason, but Sam was  _ friend  _ and had meant no harm. 

She touched him, and pulled him into her lap. Not an illusion, then. It was more comfortable, but it didn’t stop his insides from aching. More now, than they had when he collapsed. It wasn’t all physical pain, anymore. It was also heartbreak and remembered anguish.

“I can’t bear children,” he whispered. “Or so He always said.”

“You’ve been starving yourself and they are definitely suffering, but please trust me when I tell you that there is an unborn child in there and that you’re very lucky they are still alive. This stunt could well have killed them, and you. If you don’t believe me, perhaps you’d like Raphael to examine you? Or Heylel?”

His mate was going to kill him. But he wouldn’t do that to Raphael. He wouldn’t.

* * *

“You don’t have to do this! Rafa, stop!”

Heylel rolled his eyes as Mikha squirmed on the bed in their private room. Amara had called Raphael to bring a battered Michael back from Earth and had insisted that he be examined by Raphael somewhere a little more private than the big nest.

It was obvious that his mate was in pain, but he still squirmed instead of letting Raphael complete the full exam.  _ Why was Mikha doing this to himself _ ?

“Michael,” Heylel said, using his full name to carry the gravity of the situation. “If you don’t stop squirming and allow Raphael to finish the last part of the exam, I  _ will  _ tie you to the bed. In the most unsexy way possible.”

“I don’t want to know!” Michael screamed as Raphael tried to touch him again. “Raphael doesn’t want to know!” he added, when he realized his first shout wasn’t going to get him what he wanted.

Heylel plopped heavily onto the bed with a sigh. His mate was  _ in pain  _ but apparently they were going to do this  _ right now  _ because his mate was a  _ fool _ . He knew where this was going, and the words Michael had shouted are specific enough that he’s pretty sure he can guess at what this is about. He knew that Sam had asked similar questions earlier and he wishes that he had noticed then how quickly Michael had pushed it aside. Denied it.

He shook his head at Raphael after the Healer tried again, unsuccessfully, to touch Michael. 

“Raphael, if I had asked you straight, weeks ago, simply to confirm whether or not I was pregnant, and without trying to pry details about our species from you that you weren’t ready to give, what would your response have been?”

Raphael tilted his head, then his eyes widened almost imperceptibly. “As a Healer, it’s my job to put aside my discomfort when it comes to a diagnosis. I would have performed a test and given you a yes or no answer, and because my I am capable of differentiating between pregnancy, unborn fledglings, and my own trauma and experiences, it would have been fine. No, I wasn’t able to deliver Talia. It brought back flashbacks of my isolation and pain. But performing the test would not have had the same effect.”

Michael stared at Raphael and Heylel. He hiccupped, then started sobbing. It  _ could  _ be as easy as asking. “He said I couldn’t, so I can’t!”

Michael knew he sounded as petulant as a fledgling, but he didn’t care.  _ He didn’t want to know _ .

Heylel sighed again. “Well, either you are or your aren’t, and if you’re not going to let Raphael check, I guess we have to go on the assumption that you are.”   
  
“I’m not! I can’t be! It’s not possible!”

Heylel rolled over and turned himself so that he was pressed close against his mate. “You are injured, and your grace is so depleted I can just barely feel it and we are  _ bonded _ . I know that He did incredibly awful things to you when we were growing up, but you wouldn’t be insisting on this so hard right now if something hadn’t happened tonight.”

“Will you leave me alone if I let Raphael do the fucking test? I’m not pregnant and I can live with that.”

He was pretty sure that Mikha would  _ not  _ be okay if the test turned out negative, but if that was the case (he was like 90% sure it was going to be positive) they would get through it just like they’d gotten through everything else.

“I love you,” he whispered, pressing a kiss to Mikha’s cheek. “It’ll be okay.”

Michael sobbed in Heylel’s arms and Heylel nodded at Raphael to begin the test. It was a slow process of Raphael examining every inch of Michael’s grace, and Michael sobbed the entire time.

Heylel wished he knew what God had done to Michael that could ruin what should have been a joyous occasion, but he also knew it wasn’t his place to ask. When Michael was ready, he would tell them. In the meantime, he would support his mate.

Right before Raphael stepped back, Heylel saw the hint of a slight smile cross Raphael’s features. Mikha couldn’t see it from his position, and Heylel was kind of glad about it.  _ “It can not be a false positive,”  _ he whispered to Raphael on a channel of grace that Michael would not be able to hear.  _ “That  _ would  _ kill him. _ ”

Raphael nodded, before speaking quietly. “I have an idea,” Raphael turned to face Mikha. “Mikha, since I know you’re not really going to believe me regardless of what I tell you, why don’t I  _ show you _ what I found? Humans have the technology to show moving pictures of their unborn children, which I believe are called ultrasounds. I could use my grace to show you what I see, with no illusions. Is that alright?”

Mikha turned his tear streaked face towards his brother. “It’ll show exactly what is there, right now?” Raphael nodded. “Okay.”

Raphael waved his hand and a moment later there was a free standing screen in front of them. He was also holding what looked like the mobisante ultrasound probe, not that they knew that’s what it looked like. He brushed it against Michael’s abdomen and then glanced at the screen.

  
  


They all stared at the screen. The image presented to them was recognizable as a fledgling. Not fully developed by a lot, but recognizeable nonetheless. The unborn child had the very basic shape of a child, head, torso, limbs. What stuck out the most though, of course, were the extra limbs extending from the fledgling’s shoulder blades could appear to be located.

Heylel blinked at the picture. “Does she have six pairs of wings?” This was not what Heylel wanted to know more than anything else, and the main reason he asked was to distract Mikha from the panic attack it looked like he was close to having. He was also genuinely curious about this because there were no angels or archangels in Heaven having more than a single pair of wings.  Even Talia and Sami only had a single pair of wings each.

Angels also had no real gender, as the difference between those who could and those who could not carry children themselves was not determined by  _ gender _ . Heylel and his mate, and most of his siblings, used masculine pronouns because they matched with their vessels or simply didn’t care what human words were necessary to describe them. If Heylel had been speaking Enochian, he would have used the only pronoun in the language. But he hadn’t been, because they had all taken to using the much larger vocabulary provided by the English language their brothers’ mates spoke.

Raphael smiled, in that way of his that absolutely meant Heylel was  _ wrong _ . The elder archangel was okay with that, though, because Mikha had tilted his head in a way that meant that he was also interested in hearing Raphael’s answer, and that was a win. His mate would panic over the fact that there really was an unborn child there soon enough.

“No, Heylel. It only looks like there’s six wings forming because the bone segments haven’t fused yet. This image is magnified quite a lot. In reality, her entire being is smaller than the palm of your vessel’s hand.”

Mikha’s eyes had started watering, so Heylel pressed himself closer. “I’m pregnant? Really?”

Heylel was about ready to find out exactly where Mikha had locked Chuck away and maybe go beat him up. More than once. Mikha sounded utterly  _ terrified _ , and still there was disbelief, although there was just a hint of hope, which was a good sign.

“I would not lie to you about this,” Raphael said. His tone was solemn and honest, no hint of mischief or levity. “I have to insist that you don’t leave Heaven before she’s born. You are incredibly lucky that the stunt you pulled today didn’t kill you both. I’m not going to put you on complete bed rest for now, but I am going to be monitoring your health a lot closer.”

"But you don't have to do that!"

“I think Raph  _ does  _ need to do that,” Heylel argued.

“Mikha, how much pain would you say you’re in right now?” Raphael asked.

Mikha shrugged. “Less than when I collapsed in His yard? It’s mostly just discomfort, but it’s nothing. Why are you threatening to put me on bed rest? Heylel flew to Earth a few times while he was pregnant, and wandered freely around our home.”

Heylel rolled his eyes at the wall. His mate was lying, and crabby, and liable to hurt himself further. Bed rest was probably a good idea. If the stubborn idiot would actually follow it. But Mikha was his stubborn idiot, and he wouldn’t have him any other way.

“Okay,” Raphael said. “Mikha, I insist that you walk to the other end of the room and back. Then we’ll go rejoin the others in the big nest.”

What would that accomplish? Heylel wondered. He could tell that Mikha was in pain and had been lying about it being nothing more than slight discomfort, but was having him walk across the room really the best way to prove a point? “Is that necessary?” he asked, less because Mikha looked like he was about to argue and more because maybe Raphael was taking this a bit far. Michael didn’t look like he was capable of walking that distance, and he was probably stubborn enough to try it anyway instead of just losing the facade. Heylel just didn’t want to see Mikha hurt any more.

Raphael looked like he was about to say something, probably along the lines of “Yes, this is necessary, are you arguing with my methods?” Yes, yes Heylel  _ was  _ arguing with the methods, but why did all of his brothers have to be  _ so prideful _ . Wasn’t he supposed to be the one whose greatest sin was pride?

But before Raphael could actually say whatever it was he was about to say in defence of his healing methods, Michael stood up, and tried to walk towards the far end of the room.

It didn’t really count was walking. He was barely shuffling his body forward, but his face was contorted in a look of so much pain even before the first step was attempted. The second one was even more of a struggle, and Heylel wanted nothing more than to jump up and put an end to the whole farce.  _ The stubbornness of idiots apt to get themselves killed. _

But the words never made it out of Heylel’s mouth.

Just as Mikha lifted his foot to take the third step, his entire body  _ crumpled.  _ He hadn’t actually moved more than a single foot away from the bed, so it was child’s play for Raphael, who was standing right next to him, and Heylel, sitting within arm’s reach, to catch him and gently place him horizontal in the middle of the bed, gently, and so that he was not lying on the same side with the baby.

Mikha didn’t have the presence of mind to look ashamed, he just sobbed. One of his arms reached out towards Heylel, but then at the last moment he retreated, drawing his arms around himself and sobbing harder.

Heylel laid down beside his mate and touched him gently to offer the comfort that Mikha wanted but had tried to deny himself. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “We’re here for you.”

“It hurts so much,” Mikha whimpered. He scowled. “Why am I so  _ soft _ ? You and Talia-”

“Stop.” Heylel tried to keep the snarl out of his voice, and only mostly succeeded. “Stop. You did what none of us could have ever done and got rid of Him  _ completely _ . We’re never ever going to have to worry about our safety due to him coming after us, and you did  _ that  _ all by yourself. Yes, Raphi and I are incredibly worried about you right now, but that’s because we love you and care about you. You do  _ not  _ get to compare what you’re experiencing to my carrying Talia.” He considered what had occurred only hours earlier with Mikha claiming hunger so  _ desperately  _ that he’d eaten and eaten from a tree he had never before touched. He blinked. “You’ve been  _ starving yourself _ .”

Mikha froze. “What? No. I haven’t been starving myself. Why would you suggest that?”

Raphael just looked sad. How had he missed it? How had they  _ all _ ?

“You tried to eat all the fruit of a single tree. And I know that you were meeting Sam at a lot of different coffee shops, but did you actually eat any of the food you tried to buy for him? For that matter, did Sam?”

As if the words summoned him, the door to the room opened, revealing Sam, barely able to stand on his own. Slowly, he began to stumble towards the nest. Eventually, he reached the edge of Mikha’s side of the nest, almost falling over before climbing up onto the bed. He crawled the rest of the way until he was kneeling in front of Mikha.

He reached into his pockets, nearly falling over once again, before finally pulling out a wrapped granola bar from one of the several pockets. “Here, you should have it,” he mumbled, before flopping onto his side, and shifting up the bed until he was resting next to Mikha, his head laid gently upon the archangel’s shoulder. He yawned softly, snuggling close like a child to their parent, and quickly fell asleep.

The archangels were all silent, watching Sam sleep. Several minutes passed, before Heylel finally whispered. “All this time, Sam knew. Every time he would go somewhere, he would try to make sure you ate.” With a sigh, he carefully moved to pull the granola bar from Sam’s hand, before unwrapping it and placing it in Mikha’s. “You can’t just keep neglecting yourself. If you can’t take care of yourself for your sake, and can’t for mine, then please, do it for Sam, and for our children.”

Mikha wasn’t hungry, and hurt too much to want to eat. But he took a bite of the granola bar and chewed slowly, hoping that it wasn’t going to trigger the nausea that had been plaguing him for months. He mostly just wanted to cry some more because everything that was happening was a lot to take in.

Suddenly there was a light tapping on the door. A quick glance proved that it wasn’t loud enough to cause Sam to stir, although it was quite possible that nothing, not even the end of the world, would have woken Sam at that point.

Who could it be?


	2. What to Expect

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What is proofreading? I'm not going to apologize for this taking so long to finish and post, but I will share in your wishes that the next chapter won't take so long. We can hope.

The door opened and there stood Amara. She was holding something swaddled in a blanket, but none of the archangels could tell exactly what it was.

“Auntie Ama?” Mikha mumbled sleepily, yawning.

“May I come in?” she asked. “I found something in His house that never belonged there.”

Raphael nodded with a quick glance at the sleeping Sam. It did not seem that anything could or would wake him.

Hopefully with Him being gone, Sam would get to sleep without his visions and nightmares tormenting him. He deserved it, after everything that he had done for their family, especially Michael and Lucifer. If there was one thing that Raphael was most curious about when it came to Sam, it was likely by what instinct he had known that the archangels were pregnant.

Amara stepped into the room and carefully closed the door. She made sure it didn’t slam behind her, as she did not want to wake those who most needed their sleep.

“What did you find?” Raphael asked, moving around the bed so that he could get a closer look at whatever precious cargo Amara had brought with her from where He had been living on Earth.

The Goddess held out her bundle towards Raphael, once he had stepped close enough for her to reach. “I would call him Ismael,” she said.

Raphael shifted the bundle, and discovered that Amara had found a baby. Not just any baby though, because as he shifted the blanket away from the child’s back he was able to see faint wings pressed tightly against the child’s back in such a way that could not have been comfortable. Yet, it didn’t seem to him that the fault was in the blanket or the swaddling, but rather that the child had either conciously, or unconsciously, pressed the wings as close to himself as he was capable of doing.

He very carefully reached to touch the grace of the small child, but he watched Ismael’s face, so that he could pull back if this was going to wake him. Before pulling his grace back, he was able to tell that this fledgling was a child of angels, not a nephilim, or an angel that He had created himself, which was almost worse.

Who had borne this fledgling? Did they remember that their child was missing? How had Ismael ended up with Him? What had He done to him?

“Rafa?”

Raphael turned around. Mikha had asked the question, but Heylel was also staring at him.

“I wonder if Sam and Sami have been sharing dreams about the dark things this little one has had to endure,” Raphael found himself saying. It made a sickening amount of sense that it might be the case. Sam had been plagued by dreams about the suffering of innocents before, he understood, and it seemed that Sami was also possibly coming into powers as an empath, which also explained why he had been so upset over the dreams he’d been having, if it had been as bad for the child as he suspected it could have been.

“Can I see him?” Mikha asked, more sedately than Raphael was used to hearing from the eldest of them being very often.

Raphael walked back around the bed so that he could sit beside Mikha on the bed and pass the infant to him, keeping a hand underneath Ismael in case Mikha didn’t have the strength to hold him for an extended period of time.

The child seemed to fall into even deeper sleep, as Mikha snuggled him closer. Raphael found himself letting go of Ismael as Mikha leaned back against the pillows and yawned. Perhaps holding something so small and innocent would help him settle down and get his own much needed rest.

Talia was still in the big nest with the rest of their siblings minus Castiel, but it was possible that her presence would help soothe her parents, now that everything was supposed to be both calmer and safer. He wanted to examine Ismael for injuries first, though. It was also not unlikely that he would be overwhelmed if he was introduced to everyone at once. But first it would need to be determined how far along he was developmentally. He was certainly larger than a newborn, but he couldn’t begin to guess at how old he was, or whether or not He might have tried to intentionally hinder him.

“I’m going to go check on the others,” Raphael decided. The effects of what Mikha had done had seemed to affect Mikha the most, but he wanted to make sure that everyone else was okay, especially Gabriel’s fosterlings that had almost been caught in the backlash.

He slipped past Amara and headed for the big nest, where he expected everyone else to still be resting. Upon arriving, he found about what he was expecting to find.

Gabriel and the three fosterlings were sitting in the far corner of the room. They were silent, unless Gabriel had used some kind of area silencing spell so as not to disturb anyone else in the room. The fosterlings were shaking, and Gabriel seemed to be offering them some comfort.

Samael was holding Talia, who was sleeping, and he was sitting on the floor next to Aziraphale, who was playing peak-a-boo with Samandriel. It seemed that they were pretty good at distracting the fledgling from things going on around him, but it made Raphael wonder if perhaps they should get to work on private warded rooms so that there was less likeliness of needing to go to further efforts to hide things from the children.

Gabriel and Sam would need a private room for sure. His understanding of the humans the youngest archangels had chosen for their own, they’d never had permanent homes on Earth, so having private bedrooms in Heaven was the least that they deserved. A nice bedroom for Sam and Gabriel, where he could make a permanent bed with at least some of the nice bedding he had been gifted by the rest of the archangels.

He wanted to meet the fosterlings, but Raphael also didn’t want to interrupt whatever was going on between them and Gabriel, so he allowed himself to check on Sami first.

“Rafa! Rafa!” Sami shouted, giggling as Raphael flitted over and scooped the child up off the floor. There was something about the innocent joy that fledglings exuded from their entire beings. It didn’t matter that Sami was thousands of years old and should have been full grown several times over, what mattered was that he was Raphael’s innocent child and his entire being desired to protect and keep him happy.

“Raphael?” Gabriel called from the other side of the room. It either disproved Raphael’s idea that he’d used his grace to silence the area, or he’d removed it, though it wasn’t relevant. “Could you come here for a second?”

Raphael put Samandriel down in Aziraphale’s lap before walking over to Gabriel to see what the situation was. He knelt so that he would not scare them by being too tall.

“These are three of my fosterlings. Raphael, meet Hela, Fenrir, and Jormungandr.”

"Hello," Raphael greeted, stiffly. He wasn't sure why Gabriel had called him over, and the way he had done so seemed almost out of character for him.

The fosterlings nodded awkwardly, as if they weren’t certain as to what else to do.

"My brother is a Healer," Gabriel said, gently, clearly addressing the fosterlings and not him. "Would you allow him to give you each a once over? I just want to make sure you're all okay."

“He didn’t hurt us, Dad,” the girl said quietly. “Not physically.”

“Why were you there?” Gabriel asked, and his tone seemed to come across almost as desperate for some answer. 

“We heard about a missing fledgling, one that was stolen,” one of the boys started, looking away from Gabriel. “We wanted to try and find them, to see if we could try and bring them home, and maybe afterwards try to apologize to Sam for what happened at the party.”

Gabriel sighed, and Raphael could see the remaining fear covering his brother’s face. “And you didn’t think to ask for help, at any point? Fen, you and your siblings could have been  _ killed _ . How am I supposed to explain that to the twins?” He shook his head. “How did you even manage to track the fledgling there? None of us could even sense it.”

“Magic,” the girl, Hela, answered. “I used blood magic to scry for angelic blood of your blood.”

Raphael wasn’t sure what that was, except that it didn’t sound right. Or safe. “Wouldn’t that have revealed all angels or humans of nephilim blood located in the geographical location you searched?”

She shook her head. “I invoked Gabriel’s aspect as archangel of Pagan Fosterlings, so it only revealed children, and second generation nephilim and beyond wouldn’t have enough magic to show up with the spell I used, so there were only two in all of the United States. The child plaguing Sam’s nightmares, and the antichrist in Nebraska.”

He blinked. “I’m sorry, Antichrist?”

Gabriel shook his head. “I’ll explain later.” Turning back to the fosterlings, he continued. “But why didn’t you try to ask one of us for help? You know that you can always ask me for anything, no matter what’s going on, I thought that I’d made that more than clear when you were kids.”

The third child, though Raphael decided that all three were probably much older than they appeared, scratched at his pant leg, and said, “You’ve been so busy taking care of Sam, I wanted to do something for you.” He didn’t look up at Gabriel, focused entirely on his leg.

The first boy, Raphael thought he was called Fenrir, scoffed and rolled his eyes. “You’re just a suck up, Jor.”

“Fenrir!” Gabriel’s tone was sharp, as he stared down the boy. “How many times do I have to tell you not to speak of your siblings that way?”

Fenrir stuck his tongue out at Gabriel, which confused Raphael. It was a childish action, one Sami pulled from time to time, but not so sassily. Then again, Sami also didn’t act out for the sake of acting out, so he didn’t sass.

“Rafa says we gots to be nice,” Samandriel said.

Raphael turned, thinking Sami’s voice was drifting from the other side of the room, but he found that his fledgling had escaped from Aziraphale’s lap and had crawled across the room to come to him. He picked his child up and set him on his knees.

“That’s right,” Gabriel cut in before Raphael could think of what to say in response to Sami. The fosterlings were Gabriel’s children and responsibility, and it wasn’t his place to speak of their behavior. “We have to be nice, Fenrir. Especially when we’re being  _ good role models.” _

Fenrir stared at the baby on Raphael’s lap for several long moments and then said, “Yes, Dad. I’m sorry, Jor. I shouldn’t have said that.”

Leaving it at that, Gabriel said, “Sami, these are my fosterlings, Hela, Jormungandr, and Hela.”

“What’s ‘Fosterlings’, Rafa?” Sami asked.

Raphael thought for a moment about how to explain the term in a way that would make sense to Sami. "It means that Gabriel raised them and takes care of them, like how I look after you." He had been parenting Samandriel since he'd smote Naomi, and he hadn't even remembered that Sami was  _ his child _ . And they hadn't even told Sami the truth.

They'd have to. Sami should have known from the beginning. It wasn't fair to him that Raphael had hid from what had happened, or that he'd trusted Sami's care to anyone else.

"Okay, Rafa," Sami said. He looked back at the fosterlings. "Play with me?"

Fenrir and Jormungandr nodded eagerly and hurried after Sami as he motioned for them to follow him and crawled away. As soon as her brothers were behind Raphael, Hela crawled into Gabriel’s lap.

“You alright, Sweetheart?” Gabriel asked, rubbing Hela’s back. She shrugged. “Will you let Raphael make sure you’re okay? It’s non-invasive, and it should take just a few seconds. I know you’re probably fine, but just to reassure me?”

After a moment, Hela nodded. Raphael waited, because he wanted verbal consent. Gabriel may have been correct about how it would take only a moment and be non-invasive, but he still wasn’t going to do it without verbal permission. She seemed to understand, because after another moment she said, “Okay, go ahead.”

Raphael reached forward, and held his hand out to her, palm up. “I’m just going to hold your hand, okay? That’s it.”

Hela studied his hand, and then put her hers around his fingers.

The connection wasn’t only physical, which was why giving the quick examination was almost as easy as the movement of her reaching out. She didn’t have grace, or a soul, but she did have the magical essence of all Pagans, though it resembled grace more than an average pagan would have, given the length of time she must have spent in Gabriel’s company. He was able to read it like he would have read souls or grace, letting it tell him its hurts.

As she said earlier, she wasn’t physically injured, but that didn’t mean she was perfectly alright. It did seem to be nothing more than some magical exhaustion and lingering terror, which was to be expected. But even knowing for certain that she wasn’t injured was sure to give them both some comfort.

“So, what are the results?” Gabriel asked.   
  
“Clean bill of health,” Raphael said. “However, it does look like your magical reserves are a little on the low side, but that’s nothing a nap and maybe a few days of rest won’t cure.”  _ ‘She’s also still terrified, but I don’t think she’d appreciate me saying that aloud. I imagine her sitting there will help with that, though?’ _

Gabriel tilted his head just enough for Raphael to know that he was agreeing. He ran his hand down Hela’s back again. “I think that sounds like a good idea.”

Hela shifted, but Raphael noticed how she hadn’t let go of his hand yet. “I-”

“Have things to do that really can’t wait a few days?” Gabriel gestured to where her brothers were playing with Samandriel. “Do you really want to drag them back to Earth,  _ right now? _ They’d all be unbearable.” He rubbed small circles into her shoulder. “You deserve a few days to rest, and I would love it if you all stayed.”

Hela withdrew her hand from around Raphael’s, and rested it between her head and Gabriel’s knee. She yawned. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt anything.”

The girl was asleep between one breath and the next.

Gabriel smiled. “Now if only all her brothers were as easy as this one.”


End file.
